Moses and the Exodus 3.3
When Was Exodus Written?
Moses is… the most re-written… remodel1ed to the standards of the latest Jewish revisers some centuries before Christ…T R Glover
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, February 16, 1999; Thursday, 25 September 2003
Abstract
The Age of Scriptural Invention
The earliest fragments of the Greek bible ever found—late first or second century BC, if the dates are secure—are:
- PRyl 458 [#957]—a second century BC papyrus fragment of Deuteronomy 23-28
- 4Q122 [#819]—a second century BC parchment fragment of Deuteronomy 11
- 7Q1 [#805]—a first century BC papyrus fragment of Exodus 28
- 4Q119 [#801]—a first century BC parchment fragment of Leviticus 26
- Papyri Frouad 266, Cairo[#847,#848] —first century BC papyri fragments of Deuteronomy 10-33
The Rylands papyrus is entirely legal, but the Frouad features Moses, so the narrative of Moses had been written into Deuteronomy by the first century. Of ten Greek fragments, all scrolls, dated as BC listed by Robert Kraft, four are of Deuteronomy, two are Exodus and two are Leviticus. The other two are Genesis and the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremiah. A remarkable feature of some of this old Greek writing is the way “YHWH” is represented. Origen and Jerome thought the Greek Old Testament had the Name YHWH in archaic Hebrew characters. In a Qumran Leviticus fragment, it is written as “Iao”, in other cases in Greek letters that approximate to the look of the Aramaic script as “PIPI” (Frouad), and sometimes, like the Christian usage, as “Kurios” or an abbreviation of it (KS). The latter was maybe the norm (Albert Pietersma), suggesting that “Iao” was a Canaanite word for “Lord”, but the diversity in such a small sample shows a lack of standardization. The extreme reverence for “Yehouah” that excluded writing or saying it was Essene, not Pharisee. The Pharisees did pronounce it, but Essenes substituted “El”.
Demetrius, a Jew living at Alexandria in Egypt under the Ptolemies, wrote a work on the Jewish kings. One fragment takes the history up to Ptolemy IV Philopator (221-204 BC). Demetrius’s use of proper names and characteristic expressions match the Septuagint, the Greek bible, not the Hebrew scriptures. If he used the Septuagint, he was the first writer to do so, even though he was a Jew, and this dates when books of the Septuagint were first available. But perhaps the Septuagint used the works of Demetrius, or perhaps he was mistaken by Pseudo-Aristeas as the Demetrius of Phalarum who supervised the writing of the Septuagint, eighty years earlier. The fragments of his history that have been preserved by Alexander Polyhistor (80-40 BC), whose own works have also been lost but appear in fragments in Josephus and Eusebius, are about the legends of Jacob and Moses, and say nothing about the Jewish kings, but Moses had finally appeared in history outside the bible, about 200 BC.
The Palestinian Jew, Eupolemus (158 BC), the son of John, the son of Accos (1 Macc 8:17 and 2 Macc 4:11) drawing upon other traditions besides the biblical accounts, wrote On the Kings in Judea, fragments from which are in Alexander Polyhistor. Eupolemus, a diplomat and a friend of the Jewish ruler Judas Maccabee, was sent with Jason, son of Eleazar, on to Rome in 161 BC to get support from the Romans for the Hasmonean uprising against the Greek rulers. The Romans gave it, boosting the rebellion. Eupolemus wanted to show that the Jewish people went back further in history than the Greeks. In one fragment, Eupolemus says Moses taught writing to the Jews, who gave it to the Phœnicians, who passed it on to the Greeks.
A work On the Jews was excerpted by the Greek historian Alexander Polyhistor and attributed to Eupolemus. Polyhistor’s excerpts were used by Eusebius in Praeparatio Evangelica. This Eupolemus is not, though, the Jewish writer, Eupolemus, but an earlier Samaritan, so called Pseudo-Eupolemus. Pseudo-Eupolemus combined Greek tradition and Babylonian mythology with biblical narrative to yield a history of the Jews, now lost except for two fragments consisting of sixteen verses. It was written between 200 and 150 BC, and speaks of Mount Gerizim as “the mountain of the Most High”, betraying its Samaritan authorship. In these fragments, Abraham is the Jewish Orpheus, the father of the world’s science. After the deluge, he built the tower of Babel, emigrated from Chaldaea to Phœnicia to teach the Phœnicians, helping them in war. Famine drove him to Egypt, where he taught the priests of Heliopolis. Meanwhile, Enoch received astrology from the angels.
More evidence is the work of Artapanus who wrote about 50 BC, only a century before the Christians decided themselves to add their own books to the Jewish canon. Artapanus was an Egyptian Jew with a Persian name, known to us only through excerpts in the Church Fathers, but apparently keen on Egyptian and Greek culture. Moses is Musæus, the teacher of Orpheus, called Hermes, and superior in all things to his pupil. The Jews were called Hermioth before Abraham called them Hebrews!
His work, On the Jews, knew of Abraham, Jacob and Joseph but still emphasised Moses. The prominence of Egyptian references show the author was an Egyptian, but Artapanus glorified the Jewish people by elaborating even on the bible! There was even a tradition that Moses did enter the Promised Land. Perhaps that was the work of Artapanus. He makes the Egyptians indebted to the Jews for everything they knew. Abraham taught astrology to the Pharaoh Pharethothes. Jacob and his sons found the sanctuaries at Athos and Heliopolis. Joseph showed the Egyptians how to cultivate. Moses became the greatest benefactor of Egypt, founded the Egyptian religion, directing each of the 36 provinces to honour God, and introduced circumcision. He prescribed the consecration of the Ibis and of the Apis bull. Moses taught the Egyptians hieroglyphics! Moses was himself deified.
Aristobulus was a Hellenized Jew of Alexandria in Egypt, living about 160 BC, and might be the same Aristobulus as he to whom the letter in 2 Maccabees (2 Macc 1:10) was addressed. There, he is of the family of anointed priests and is the teacher of Ptolemy the king—presumably Philometer VI (181-145 BC). A fragment of a paraphrase and commentary on the Pentateuch, for a Pagan readership and dedicated to Ptolemy Philometor, has been preserved by Clement of Alexandria, and by Eusebius.
Aristobulus says the Pentateuch had been put into Greek so long before the Greek translation of the Pentateuch made under Ptolemy Philadelphus that even Homer and Hesiod were indebted to Moses. Clement confirmed he aimed to prove that all the Greek philosophers and many Greek poets, as well as Aristotle, took from the law of Moses—the Pentateuch and the prophets—and so Greek culture was entirely derived from the Old Testament. The whole system of Aristotle could, he thought, be found in the bible, and philosophers as prominent as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato all copied Moses. Later Jewish Hellenists—notably Philo—accepted that Moses was the father of Greek philosophy and culture. The truth in it is that Mazda was, not Moses. It was the new religion of the Persians that stimulated the Greek philosophers to levels of genius, and also invented a law for the Jews. The lawgiver, Mazda, was then brought down to earth as Moses.
That ancient Greek philosophy had no detectable sign that it had ever heard of Moses—it knew of Oromazdes—did not deter Aristobulus. Typically, he invented the historical evidence, making spurious citations from Hesiod, Homer, Linus, and especially from Orpheus, even though Musæus and Orpheus are mythical! In fact, these citations themselves are forged, and transparently by someone Jewish. If the forger was Aristobulus, then the whole work is dubious. Moreover, since he particularly drew upon Hellenized Jewish works like Proverbs, Ben Sira, and the Wisdom of Solomon, Greek influence was clear, but, on the familiar conviction that the Jewish scriptures are terribly ancient, he put the cart before the horse. The old cons are the best ones! What is interesting is that one of the fragments discusses the Jewish calendar. Aristobulus established that the Passover always falls immediately after the vernal equinox.
Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity also used the Sibylline Oracles, first written about 160 BC, in Egypt, but easily added to, various copies being accessible for adaptation for religious propaganda. The forgers recast the classical theogony in a Jewish Old Testament mould—Noah becomes Uranos, Shem Saturn, Ham Titan, and Japheth Japetus. The ancient oracles—of the Erythraean predicting the fall of Troy, and of the Sibyl of Cumae that Tarquinius Superbus deposited in the Capitol when Rome was new—became propaganda for the Jewish God. The earliest sentences, besides a few Pagan oracles, are Jewish in form, while most of the later ones are Christian. The dates of these forgeries are first and second century AD. Diodorus of Sicily (Siculus), writing in the first century BC, mentions the expulsion of foreigners from Egypt, including Danaus and Cadmus who went to Greece(!), and Moses who went to Judaea.
Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50 AD) knew little Hebrew, reading his scriptures in the Septuagint, but he explained in Moses that the Septuagint perfectly accords with “the Chaldæan”, because the 72 priests on the island of Pharos all gave the same Greek translation of the original, God’s guarantee the translation was holy. Actually, Chaldæan is Aramaic not Hebrew, and Philo wanders considerably from what is considered to be acceptable in the Septuagint. He seems to freely extend the story of Moses, and alters the order of the plagues of Egypt. It all suggests that no received version of the story of Moses was known even to Philo. A variety of traditions existed, and Philo might have been happy to add to them his own versions. The Chaldæan he spoke of was the Magian tradition of Moses expanded by the Egyptian priests 2-300 years before, written in Aramaic script (Chaldæan). Some descriptions are mystical sounding, in the mystery tradition rather than what is now accepted. Moses entered the darkness, saw what was hidden from the gaze of mortals, saw his life arrayed for all to view as a model for everyone. He was a demi-god.
Philo deliberately never mentions the story of Balaam’s ass. Jews had been considered as worshippers of an ass or an ass’s head from about the third century BC, when the Mosaic tales and the Exodus were first written out fully by the Ptolemaic priesthood in conjunction with the priests of the Jerusalem temple, then controlled by the Egyptian Greek kings. For example, Plutarch, a man acknowledged to have a solid foundation in Jewish lore, takes it as given that Jews worshipped an ass because an ass had led the people to water in the desert during the Exodus. Half a century later, Josephus confirms that the belief was widespread from his need to refute it. Jews also were said to sacrifice young men, never to have had an empire, and to take an oath against the Greeks, all of which were true at one time. Josephus blames it all on the Egyptians. Bishop Epiphanius tells a story from the Gospel of the Birth of Mary that Zacharias had a vision in the temple of a man in the form of an ass. Amazed, he was about to blurt out to the Jews whom they worshipped when he was struck dumb. Later, though, he recovered, told it to the Jews and they killed him for it. It was said to be the reason why the high priest wore bells, so that, when he went into the temple, “he whom they worshipped, hearing the noise of the bells, might have time enough to hide himself, and not be caught in that ugly shape and figure”.
Certainly, the Moses legend was elaborated late, then started growing and suppressing the Babylonian tradition. This tendency left unmolested by developments like Christianity would have probably ended with the stories of the Patriarchs suppressed, and so too the return from Babylon. By around 100 AD, Justus of Tiberias was writing a history of the Jews beginning with Moses. The legends of Abraham and the origin of the Jews in Ur of the Chaldees, Babylonia, had been suppressed by the Alexandrines. Tacitus also refers briefly to the origins of the Jews as being Egypt. The Jews having been evicted by the Pharaoh, Bocchoris, on the instructions of the oracle of Amon, were led by Moses in a six day march. Arriving in a thinly populated land on the seventh day, they expelled the locals and founded a temple and a city.
The propaganda of the Ptolemies, whose aim was the same as the policy of the earlier Persians, but in reverse, so to speak—to gain the favour of the Jews of Jerusalem—evidently became the tradition in the Mediterranean. Egypt under the Ptolemies wanted Judah as a buffer against their rivals the Seleucid Greeks of Syria, and so set about favouring the Jerusalem temple and priesthood, helping them to revise their holy books to suit Egyptian geopolitics. Manetho, Chaeromon and Apion all call Moses an Egyptian priest, Josephus says. It is hard for believers nowadays, conditioned by a peculiar reverance for the Jewish scriptures, to accept that they evolved as a consequence of ancient politics, though nothing much has changed.
Other Jewish works not included in the biblical canon are no more help. None are older. Stephen C Meyers reckons the oldest non-biblical Jewish chronicle is Seder Olam Rabbah or Book of the Order of the World, written by Jose Ben Halafta who died about 160 AD, but edited in the eighth century AD. Jubilees (c 100 BC) is non-canonical and has the novelty of giving a history of the Jews dated in Jubilees, periods of 49 years. Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, a scriptural history from Adam to David, is dated in the first half of the first century AD. The Testament of Moses, a dying testament by Moses to Joshua, dates in the first century AD.
Exodus a Late Addition to the Jewish Scriptures
The Essenes were still compiling, revising and composing psalms, at least until the first century BC and probably until they were dispersed after the Jewish War, and the exploits of some of the Hasmonaeans were written into the stories of Moses and David, most obviously the story of Phinehas.
The Genesis Apocryphon of the Dead Sea scrolls, relates Abraham’s journey to Egypt, naming the Pharaoh as “Pharaoh Zoan, the king of Egypt”. Zoan is a place not the name of a Pharaoh, once considered the same place as Avaris, Raamses, and Tanis. The Pharaoh lived at Zoan, confirmation for biblicists that the Hyksos were the Jews, because the Hyksos had their capital at Avaris.
Now, Tanis (cognate with Zoan) was unimportant until it became the residence of the Pharaohs in the twenty-first and twenty-third Dynasties, 1070-946 and 828-715 BC. Thereafter, Sais became the main Egyptian city. So many monuments were found at Tanis inscribed with the name Rameses, it was thought that Tanis was the store-city of Rameses mentioned in Exodus 1:11. Then these monuments were found to have been moved to Tanis from Qantir or Tell ed-Dab’a, some fifteen miles south on the Pelusiac Branch of the Nile, the proper site of the Hyksos capital of Avaris. Tanis or Zoan was therefore not Avaris or Raamses and could have had nothing to do with Moses!
Significantly, Zoan (later, San al-Hagar) was again an important political and commerical center during the Ptolemaic period from 300 BC—and remained so until the sixth century AD. Numbers 13:22 states parenthetically that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan, an apparently pointless remark, but the name “Talmai” (Ptolemy) appears in the same verse, crying out the period when it was written. The authors of Isaiah and Ezekiel (Isa 19:11,13; Ezek 30:14) speak of it. It implies that Numbers and these prophetic works were written in the Ptolemaic period by people who knew Egypt at the time.
Even in the bible, considering that Moses is the Jewish lawgiver, he is rarely mentioned in the Jewish scriptures outside of Exodus. The founder of any religion ought to be frequently and multiply mentioned, as Christ is in the New Testament. Few texts of the bible outside the Torah mention Moses, surely a remarkable and inexplicable fact if Moses was as important to Jewish identity as he seems to be, and was as early in their history as they claim. Moses appears in 40 passages of Exodus, 16 of Numbers, 6 of Deuteronomy, 6 of Joshua, 5 of Psalms. Elsewhere the “law of Moses” appears occasionally but Moses himself is never mentioned more than twice (Leviticus, 1 Chronicles). In the prophets, Moses is only mentioned in Micah 6:4, Isaiah 63:11-12 and Jeremiah 15:1. Perhaps even more significant is the discovery by Tomasz Derda (ZPE 115, 1997) that Jews in antiquity rarely or never used Moses as a name. Christians began doing it. The Moses myth had no impact on late Judaism.
All this cries out that Exodus was a late addition to the collection of biblical books, and that the prophets certainly knew nothing about the amazing founder of the Jewish race and religion. The psalms in which Moses appears are all Persian period, and the other citations are recognized as post-“exilic” editorial insertions. The reason is that only after the “exile” was the figure of Moses invented.
Only with the Babylonian exile did the figure of Moses acquire the importance that the Jewish tradition attributes to it.J Alberto Soggin
A Parable of the Return from Exile
Soggin accurately notes that the Moses myth is also a parable of the “return” from “exile” in Babylon. Moses brings the true Israel from a foreign oppression into a home provided by God as His theocracy despite the opposition of the false Israel who prefer to worship idols. Moses is Ezra, the last and greatest of the “returners”. Moses found refuge in Midian as the son-in-law of the priest of Midian. Midian seems to be biblical code for the Medes (and Persians). It was while he was a shepherd in Midian that he saw the burning bush. The Zoroastrian religion venerated fire which was also their name for truth.
The Christian librarian, Julius Africanus, born about 200 AD, and a pupil of Heraclas in Alexandria, declares there is no certain history before the first Olympiad (776 BC). It is an honest enough statement but he then goes on to establish the date of Moses, even though it is long before the first Olympiad! Plainly enough, even for the Christian Fathers, concepts in Exodus, (19:1ff) like a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation” as alternatives to a corrupt monarchy, cannot have been written by Moses who knew nothing about monarchy because he died before the Promised Land was ever entered, let alone run as a kingdom. They were written by priests sent from Persia to do just as they said.
Professor Sarna wants us to believe that no biblical writer could have had any reason to invent the bondage in Egypt and the Exodus, and would have written down a proper historical account if it differed from the one in the bible. He quotes Bright who wrote a well known “history” of Israel:
It is not the sort of tradition any people would invent! Here is no heroic epic of migration but the recollection shameful servitude from which only the power of God brought deliverance.John Bright
This defence is nonsense. The British still celebrate a shameful defeat by the Nazi tank brigades in WWII because the defeat was ameliorated by the evacuation from Dunkirk’s beaches in small boats of a substantial part of the BEF. There is no way of seeing it as other than a disastrous defeat but the British succeed in seeing it as a victory. Without it, and demoralized, the war might have been lost. The Romans equally note the tragedy of the defeated Aeneas fleeing the flames of Troy, carrying his elderly father on his back and holding his young son by the hand, into exile in Italy where his dynasty becomes the Alban kings, scions of whom, Romulus and Remus, found their city. Bright, anyway, assumes that the Jews wrote the story of Moses themselves. They did not.
Professor Sarna also puts the same argument in his own words:
We are at a loss to explain the necessity of fabricating an uncomfortable and disreputable account of Israel’s national origins, nor can we conceive how such a falsity could so persuade the national psyche as to eliminate all other traditions and historical memories, let alone become the dominant and controlling theme in the national religion.
Sarna is not a professor for nothing, but whatever it is, it is not for scientific objectivity. He steadfastly puts his telescope to his blind eye! Let us put it up to his good eye.
The account was fabricated to justify the imposition on Israel of the Persian religion. It is uncomfortable and disreputable because it seeks to depict the polytheistic Israelites that remained in Judah as apostates from the true God, Yehouah, a mirror image of the Persian God, Ahuramazda. The story shows the benefits of acceptance of this god and the horrors of refusing to accept him, or of apostatizing, having initially accepted him.
It succeeded in eliminating earlier traditions only with difficulty, but after about four generations and the construction of a thoroughly mythical history, Jews not only had accepted it as the controlling theme in the national religion, they jealously guarded it as proof that God had chosen them as His elect. By 300 BC, the Greeks had defeated and replaced Persia as the ruling culture, had destroyed the Persian holy books and priesthood, and the remaining Persian tradition was left in the hands of the Jews, now convinced that the religion they had had imposed on them was their own, and the mythology that had been used to justify it was true history.
In the second century BC, the Jewish holy books were in turn largely destroyed in the war between the Maccabees and the Greeks. Only the success of the Maccabees allowed them to be restored from what fragments remained, the memories of the priests and the imagination of the Hasmonaeans seeking to justify their newly established kingdom. They were largely re-written or newly written. From this period the religion factionalized and then spun off Christianity and itself was consciously modified into Rabbinism.
Final Note on Islam
The heroes of Judaism such as Abraham, Moses, Solomon and David are mythical. They are in the same bracket as Jason, Hercules, Aeneas and King Arthur. Any almighty God, whether of the Jews, Christians or the Moslems knows it and could hardly have written or even inspired any books in which He addressed these heroes as if they were real. Inasmuch as the Quran does (eg 21:52 Abraham; 20:8-14 Moses; 21:49 Moses; 7:139 Moses; 21:79 Solomon; 21:82 David), it is as faulty as the bible is, and has its own proof within its body that it is not the book of any almighty God, who must have known better. Human beings, on the other hand, thought these were real historical heroes. That is why they appear in these books. They were written by fallible human beings and not by any God, or angels instructed by the God, or even any humans inspired by God.
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Moses and Exodus
